


Like the Punchline to a Bad Joke

by sapphireswimming



Category: Critical Role (Web Series), UnDeadwood (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Episode: s01e04 Goodnight Miss Miriam, Gen, Gen Work, Grief/Mourning, Oneshot, UnDeadwood Mini-series (Critical Role), and the lack of grief/mourning, painful painful irony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 04:00:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21469726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphireswimming/pseuds/sapphireswimming
Summary: Aloysius Fogg walks into the Gem Saloon.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 48





	Like the Punchline to a Bad Joke

**Author's Note:**

> Set during (with major spoilers for) the end of Episode 4: Goodnight, Miss Miriam

Sharpe falls to his knees, and then to the ground on the darkened, dusty main street of Deadwood, a smile painted across his face as the lifeblood pours out of him with every ebbing beat of his pierced heart.

Behind them, Aloysius can see where Arabella has stopped still, slender gloved fingers pressed against her mouth in horror, can hear Ms. Miriam’s rising pleas of no no no _no no no no no_\- as she shakes her head in denial, can tell when the Reverend finally steps forward out of his stupor to offer a prayer for their fallen companion.

He ignores them, but as he returns his revolver to its holster, he considers the man across from him, the fallen outlaw. Who’d saved his hide more than once these past few days, saved them all from the horrors that had rightly sent most of the residents of the town fleeing.

Who he'd just shot dead in cold blood.

Alysius stoops to close the man’s eyes.

And then he turns, slowly walking up the steps of the Gem Saloon, through the main level – deserted aside from Johnny who backs away from him as he slowly passes the bar – and up the creaking staircase to his room.

His bad leg drags behind him, but the bone-deep ache that has accompanied it ever since the fall has dulled to a low thrum on every other step that barely even registers.

Similarly, the bullet wound in his chest should be agony with every breath, should rage and burn with every whisper of movement, but after his gloved fingertips come away wet with blood, all he can manage is a half-hearted shrug into the darkness. He should get it seen to, but he’d killed Doc Cochran, or, the thing that had once been Doc Cochran, just hours ago in the pit on the edge of camp.

Well, he’d been shot before, and in his line of work, he was bound to be shot again sooner or later. He doesn’t know all that much in the way of first aid, but he knows enough to get him through the night.

Once in the safety of his room, door locked securely behind him, he takes his teeth to the threadbare sheets of his bed, ripping a long strip that he folds neatly into a pad to staunch the flow of blood and another that he gingerly wraps around his chest and shoulder to hold it in place. He winces as he ties it off with a rough knot, but honestly, it hurts a hell of a lot less than he’d expect of a bullet this close to his heart.

A good thing, too, because all he wants to do is sleep. He’s been tired before, been tired for _years_, spent night after restless night wanting nothing more than to close his eyes and slip into the darkness that he knows will hold neither rest nor peace.

Something always comes to wake him, no matter how tired he is, no matter how many miles he’s ridden, or how many days he’s pursued his target.

The faces that haunt his dreams, his nightmares, he knows them well. They’re burned onto the back of his eyelids just as searingly as a bolt of lightning cracking through the midnight sky and the white-hot flames that devour the silhouette of a church while the people inside continue to sing.

But tonight, they aren’t howling at him, aren’t reaching for him with the ghostly grasp of the long, long dead. Tonight, they too feel dull and far away, and the bed’s beckoning him like it rarely has before.

He swings his legs onto the thin, lumpy mattress, not bothering to remove his boots, and settles back against the single pillow between him and the headboard. It’s surprisingly comfortable.

Aloysius closes his eyes and, for the first time he can remember, he sleeps well.


End file.
